


Alarms Will Ring for Eternity

by ExtraPenguin



Category: My Blood - Ellie Goulding (Song), Original Work
Genre: Gen, Necromancy, Rebirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 06:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14827362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/pseuds/ExtraPenguin
Summary: Chila waited. It was a remarkably pleasant day to be a soulless not-quite-corpse, broken and dying on the ocean rocks.





	Alarms Will Ring for Eternity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Panny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panny/gifts).



> [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFatODUR1CE)   
>  [lyrics](https://genius.com/Ellie-goulding-my-blood-lyrics)

Chila lied on the rocks on the shore. The sea was wine-dark from her blood. The sky was rendered fuzzy by the blood loss. A man who considered himself her archnemesis was pulling out her soul, one thread at a time, unraveling the myriad connections that anchored it to her body.

The last thread was the strongest. He had to tug at it repeatedly to yank it free from her heart. Unlike the other tendrils relenting, this one hurt.

Chila waited. It was a remarkably pleasant day to be a soulless not-quite-corpse, broken and dying on the ocean rocks.

There were restraining magics where the only way to remove them was to remove the soul. The waves hammered at the lingering restraints. She may have no soul, but she still had her breath, and one only needed one of them, anyway. The soul was what one was; the breath was what one _did_.

When the first of the restraints went, Chila felt her whole body vibrate, jolting the broken bones and shattered sinews. The breath of the ocean continued its unwitting liberation.

She felt the last of the restraints shatter. It had been a while since she’d been unceremoniously abandoned here. It’d be high tide soon, enough to lift her corpse off the rocks and abandon it in the salty ocean depths.

Chila breathed in and stretched her arms out, ignoring the screaming pain from her whole body, and used her newly unsealed powers to raise herself up from the dead. It was disconcerting, how her bones snapped back into place, her fleed flesh flew back, and her skin stitched itself together.

She rolled over in her newly whole body and left behind the blood-stained rocks.

 

Her army of raised corpses burned to ashes, Chila was brought in front of the Grand Council, specially gathered for the occasion. She was in chains, but she held her head up high and back straight. She had done no wrong.

“What were you trying to accomplish?” the Speaker of the Grand Council yelled at one point.

Chila looked at her in the eye. “Immortality – for everyone.”

“For as long as your soul still clings to your body, you will be unable to raise the dead,” the sentence went. The chains turned from metal to metaphorical.

Chila walked out of the hall like she had walked in, head high and back straight. Her twice-dead friends would have to wait, but she would come back to them.

 

The soul of the wind was that it could be breathed. The breath of the wind was that it could push. The soul of the earth was that it could be stood on. The breath of the earth was that it could crush. Chila’s breath was what she did. Chila’s soul was her human nature. Missing it was an inconvenience, even if less of an inconvenience than missing her breath would be.

Human memory was short and fallible, and there would always be idiots who thought a punishment for a crime was too lenient without reading it.

The man had been one of those advocating for the utter destruction of her soul, her breath, and her body. No doubt he’d head to her hometown to make a production of destroying her soul. Chila listened and found the corpse of a horse. She brought it back. A fine steed it was, with a golden coat that outshined the Sun and a glossy black mane, tail, and lower legs. Like her, it was soulless and thus not a horse; its breath had been bequeathed by her, and like all things she’d resurrected, it was grateful for the breath.

Chila mounted the mare. Together, they ran towards her birth-home.

 

Many people mistook the nature of Chila’s relationship with her resurrected. She forced no-one, and could force no-one. The breath of life was simply a gift too great for people not to repay, and the resurrected were eager to defend the one who had brought them back to life.

The mare tossed her head. They were almost at the city.

Chila rode through empty streets. The event must’ve started. She urged on her mare.

“The only punishment fit for the evil necromancer Chila’s soul is destruction!” a man called from behind a crowd. He yelled some more about her perceived crimes, all of which boiled down to raising the dead. She’d readily admitted to all of them when asked. Why should raising the dead be more wrong than making them?

She saw her soul was held in a small jar the man was waving around, and didn’t worry. He’d have to let it out to destroy it, and she’d have ample opportunity to call it over from over here, where she had the height advantage of being on a small hill and sitting on a horse. She looked down at the platform from behind the crowd on the hill’s slope.

“-and now I shall take that vile criminal’s soul and scatter it!” he shouted. Some people cheered, but not as many as would have had he had any gift of the gab.

He opened the jar wide. _Come home_ , Chila called her soul, arms spread wide in invitation.

The soul came, the little thing with overmuch importance attached to it that made it immoral to kill her and painted the world with vivid colors and emotions and was the lodestone through which she could focus her powers. Delight blossomed beneath her breast, and ran throughout her body along the bones broken scant days ago. She laughed with joy. Even her mount seemed happy on her behalf. She bent to pat her dear mare on the neck.

“You! How could you have survived?” the man yelled at her.

“Did you forget I could raise the dead?” Chila laughed. The city’s main graveyard was nearby, and she’d heard a recent plague had filled the cemeteries she’d emptied. She urged on her horse, around the crowds and past the crosswise streets, and they trotted through the graveyard, Chila bestowing breath on all the corpses, young and old, raising them from their unfortunate demises and giving them a second chance and telling them to go find their survivors and be happy.

Why should she care one whit about the laws of nature? No master god had ever come down to smite her with lightning. Leaving a chaotic scene of reunions behind her, she rode her golden horse towards another graveyard.


End file.
